The financial company said its OpenAI-powered assistant has had 2.3 million conversations since it went live a month ago. Jonas Walzberg/picture alliance via Getty Images
Klarna says its AI assistant does the work of 700 people.
The Swedish financial company says the assistant is on par with human employees when it comes to customer satisfaction.
Not everyone is impressed, but the assistant is another sign of the company’s enthusiasm for AI.
This is a machine translation of an article from our US colleagues at Business Insider. It was automatically translated and checked by a real editor.
Klarna says its AI assistant does “the work of 700 full-time agents.” In one Blog post On the company’s website, the financial firm said its OpenAI-powered assistant has had 2.3 million conversations since it went live a month ago.
The company claims that the chatbot is more precise when “running errands” and is on par with human employees in terms of customer satisfaction. The posting also said that the technology is estimated to bring the company $40 million (€37 million) more profit by 2024.
One user, Gergely Orosz, a software engineer and author of The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, said he was skeptical after trying out Klarna’s AI assistant. “He’s… unconvincing. He recites accurate documents and quickly directs me to human support,” he said in a post on X.
Read too
Installment purchase with Klarna or Paypal? This example calculation shows how much more expensive this is compared to a bank loan
Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna, has long been passionate about AI. He told that „Telegraph“ At the end of last year, the Swedish fintech company said it would no longer hire new employees outside of the technical department because of the company’s reliance on AI. “There will be a shrinkage of the company,” Siemiatkowski said in December. “We are currently not hiring any new employees at all, apart from engineers.”
While the Klarna boss said he doesn’t plan to lay off any more employees, natural turnover means the company will shrink over time, and AI will replace the missing employees. Klarna had previously laid off 700 employees in 2022. At the time, the company faced headwinds due to the 10 percent job cuts. Siemiatkowski used a pre-recorded video message to break the news to the 700 affected employees.
Read the original article in English here.